Almost simultaneous with the Army’s announcement that the peacetime draft would shift into high with the induction of 20,000 trainees in January was the companion announcement by General Jacob L. Devers, chief of Army Ground Forces, that every youth drafted into the Army “will be treated as a human being, never a raw recruit.” Speaking before the American War Mothers, General Devers outlined a serviceman’s utopia in which draftees would be sent to posts “as near home as possible,” would be given a “chance to ask questions,” and would be assigned uniforms “individually fitted.”
As if that were not enough to indicate a new way of Army life, General Devers
assured the mothers that training instructors, no longer to be thought of as
tough drill sergeants, would try "to establish a personal relationship with the
incoming recruit," and that all trainees would be "told the reason for
everything they do that is new to them." The Army's principal authority on
combat training then went on to say that the Army would insist that each
trainee write home; that each would be interviewed by hiscompany
commander and chaplain, both of whom, in turn, would write personal letters to
his mother; and that (the real clincher) "neither he nor his instructors will
use profanity."

The good General's attempts to lighten the hearts of American mothers had a
derisive reception among World War II veterans -- among those, at least, who
let their reactions be known to newspapermen. The most recent victims of the
Army's penchant for sending Maine fishermen to the California desert and Oregon
lumbermen to Cape Cod were unanimous in the opinion that it would be a good
thing if the Army could assign men to camps within easy traveling distance of
home. But they warned that "as near home as possible" was a typical and
necessary Army "out."

As for individually fitted uniforms, one ex-infantryman remarked that he had
"spent four years looking for the individual my uniform was fit for."

Buttoning his civilian sports jacket more securely, an ex-pfc pointed out that
there was nothing new or particularly desirable about having training
instructors establish a "personal relationship with the incoming recruit." "My
own instructor-recruit relationship," he recalled, "was very personal --
painfully so, in fact." And taking up the promise that the recruit would be
given a reason for everything that was new to him, a former Chemical Warfare
sergeant said, "Sure, the reason being: 'I told ya to do it and shut up!'"

A captain of paratroopers who was retired for wounds was disturbed by the
declaration that neither the recruit nor the instructors would use profanity.
"How," he wondered, "are they going to teach anything?"

Such comments may be overcaustic, but two of the veterans I have quoted shed
enough blood in and around the Bulge to have a deep personal interest in a
well-run Army. They are heartily in favor of the Army's attempts to lighten the
life of enlisted men. They know, however, that no amount of sugar-coating can
disguise the fact that military life of necessity must be in harsh opposition
to the democratic virtues of undisciplined civilian life.

The veterans have not forgotten that much the same picture of humanized service
in a "civilian" Army was projected for their benefit at the start of the 1940
draft. At that time, too, military leaders were busily promoting the idea that
the Army was not so much a militarized regime as a glorified trade school in
which young men not only equipped themselves for steady peacetime work but also
acquired all the wholesome personal qualities that, by implication, their
parents, schools, and churches had failed to nurture.

The GI of 1940 -1945 was not treated, to borrow another fine phrase from
General Devers, as "a person of individual dignity and feelings." And there
will be no sadder Sad Sack than the draftee of 1949 who expects to have a
tender regard shown for his individuality. The Army's job is to reduce diverse
personalities to fighting groups of men trained to act in unison and without
hesitation at a given command. As the wounded captain of paratroopers pointed
out, "The Army wouldn't be an army if the men in its ranks were not broken
early of the notion that their personal feelings had any bearing whatsoever on
the conduct of a military operation. Nobody should know that better than a
general."

By an ironic twist the veterans were not alone in their opinion that General
Devers was much too able and forthright a soldier to believe what he would have
the American War Mothers believe. His soothing words boomeranged when one of
our more realistic American mothers wrote to the New York Herald Tribune
protesting the ban on the top sergeant's profanity ("That is not a crime -- it's
an art.") and suggested that the General had been put on the spot by too much
''Momism.'' Her letter raised a pertinent point:

"Just why, please, must the mothers of these draftees be placated in this way?
War being war, and the draft designed to make men and not sissies out of our
youth, I can see no point in a boarding-school approach and soft treatment. And
not to face the realities of discomfort, loneliness and the hard give-and-take
of mixed humanity around them in camp is to deprive these boys of the very
essence of the new experience which will make them come alive to their own
efficiency and ability -- if it is there -- to meet whatever happens.

To understand why the Army pretends that it is running a boarding school, one
must recall what happened in late 1945 and early 1946. That was the period when
the GI's of World War II regained their civilian freedom of speech and had
their innings at the expense of their former officers. The home front was
suddenly exposed to a five-year accumulation of gripes about the rigors of
living as a slave to rank. On top of that, the end of censorship meant a heavy
dose of hitherto untold stories of gambling, graft, and promiscuous girls in
every theater of operation, with accounts of bungling and brutality adding more
fat to the fire.

When the Army tried to push the idea of Universal Military Training in 1946 it
met the determined resistance not only of politically orientated groups but
also of militant members of religious and parental organizations who by that
time had a fixed notion that military life was "bad for our boys." The Army
spent all of 1947-1948 trying to dispel this notion and, with UMT still the
goal, hasn't relaxed its efforts yet. The public must be made to realize that
training the nation's youth for war is the best way to train them for peace.

What the Army means this time when it promises that recruits will be treated as
human beings is that the training procedures developed at Fort Knox will be
extended throughout the Army, wherever practical. (As the veterans would say,
keep an eye on the Army's "out.") For those who don't know -- and if such
persons exist, the Army will feel that its public relations staff has fallen
down -- Fort Knox from January, 1947, through July, 1948, was the scene of what
must stand as the world's most noble experiment in the techniques of
democratizing, purifying, and mentally energizing an army unit. And it worked,
within certain limits.

Anyone who accepted the Army's invitation to see the first 664 Umtees in action
at their Fort Knox training center must agree that no dogface ever had it so
good. The simulated draftees had excellent food, luxurious lounging facilities,
Army-imported girls for post dances, hobby shops, educational programs, and the
personal attention of chaplains, doctors, psychiatrists, and a variety of
teachers. Their high spirits were everywhere apparent, despite the official ban
on drinking, profanity, and bad women.

The teen-age Umtees attended church as GI's never had before, sat through
protracted lectures on morality and good citizenship, and enrolled in
educational courses ranging from radio-station techniques to Spanish. Fifty-one
of them were able to obtain the equivalent of a high school diploma, and only
one contracted a venereal disease. To make everything perfect, the Protestant
chaplain had eighty-two of the boys come to him for baptism, while ten were
baptized by the Catholic chaplain, twenty-two received First Communion, and
thirty-three were confirmed.

To keep the record straight it must be noted that the 664 Umtees were
hand-picked from volunteers for Regular Army service and had been thoroughly
indoctrinated in the importance of their showing the value of the UMT
experiment. They could hardly be called reasonable facsimiles of 664 boys
conscripted from civilian life.

Moreover, they were under the close personal supervision, for six months, of
560 carefully selected officers and enlisted men, plus a staff of civilian
teachers. Not even a wealthy private school, let alone an undermanned Army,
could provide such individualized training as a regular thing.

So the training at Fort Knox must be considered as ideal rather than typical.
As for the results: it's true that attendance at religious services was almost
100 per cent during the first month when the only alternative was an hour-long
lecture. After that the attendance of Protestant trainees dropped to 25 per
cent, with the Catholic boys continuing to respond somewhat better. It is also
true that 21 per cent of the boys were inspired to enroll for evening
educational courses, but only 8 per cent of them completed the courses they
had selected -- which tends to dispel the rumor that the Army has successfully
blended military training and higher education.

Baptisms and diplomas are less important to an army, however, than good morale,
and the Umtees had plenty of the latter. Those who were able to talk to
reporters on the side were most convincing in their assurances that the
morality regulations imposed on them were not too tough to take. They had to
observe the no-swearing rule only when certain officers known to be
conscientious were around. They could not get beer and prophylactics at their
Post Exchange, but it wasn't much trouble to go the extra distance to the
regular Fort Knox PX. And while the bartenders of Louisville were warned not to
serve them drinks, no bartender could spot an Umtee who had taken the
precaution of removing his distinguishing insignia.

The Army, let me hasten to add, is candid enough to admit, when not talking to
American mothers, that much of the Fort Knox training program is not applicable
to the draft. What the Army hopes is that its various training commands will
gradually be able to adopt such constructive Fort Knox developments as the
trainee court, in which the recruits themselves judge and impose punishment for
minor infractions of regulations, the prohibition against profanity during the
training period, the religious instruction, the compulsory citizenship and
morality lectures by chaplains and others, and the elimination of browbeating
through personalized student-instructor relations.

The catch is that even this moderate amount of special handling for draftees is
too much to ask of military training commands at this juncture. Training cadres
are in such short supply and existing field units, notably combat divisions and
anti-aircraft battalions, are so undermanned that a large percentage of
draftees, like the eighteen-year-old volunteers, must be sent straight to
combat outfits after a short period of indoctrination. This means that their
basic training will be in divisions rather than in Fort Knox type schools, and
that it will be limited at the outset to eight weeks, in contrast to the
six-month course at Fort Knox. Under the circumstances some of their officers
may be too busy to remind them to write home to their mothers.

The Army Army can boast that it had no less respected a figure than General Jimmy
Doolittle head an investigation of GI gripes about the military "caste" system,
and that it took action on twelve of the fourteen recommendations in the
Doolittle Report.

In response to popular demand the Army has approved "in principle" the
Doolittle recommendations that the food, travel privileges, travel allowances,
and opportunities for advancement be "equalized" among officers and enlisted
men. It has promised a more equal distribution of decorative awards. It has
dropped the military regulation prohibiting the association of officers and
men, although the officers' exclusive clubs remain. It has made off-post
saluting unnecessary, except in occupied territories and special situations. It
has enabled enlisted men to accumulate terminal leave pay, as officers do, and
made it easier for them to register complaints.

In addition to these reforms, which will be carried out "where practical," the
Army has taken steps to make the dress uniforms of officers and men alike,
except for insignia, and to discourage, "where necessary," those officers who
use military vehicles (and enlisted drivers) for social purposes, or who use
off-limits signs to reserve civilian pleasures for themselves, or who
commandeer more than their share of liquor and other scarce items. Most
important of all, the Army has reformed, under Congressional compulsion, its
Prussianized court-martial system.

Embedded in the 1948 Selective Service Act is the requirement that the Army
must drop its star-chamber approach to justice and base its disciplinary
actions on something akin to civilian court procedures. So now, for the first
time, enlisted men are authorized to be members of the court in the trial of
other enlisted men, if the accused so desires. This is in keeping with the
time-honored civilian conception of the right of a man to be tried by his
peers. Its effect is somewhat offset by the presence of officers on the same
jury and by the fact that the enlisted men who serve as jurors will be selected
by the commanding officer who calls the court and who holds their future in his
hands.

Other safeguards written into the Selective Service Act for better
administration of military justice are the provisions that the law member of
the court-martial, the judge advocate, and the counsel for the defense be
professional lawyers, that the accused be represented by counsel at pre-trial
investigations, and that he be allowed to cross-question prosecution witnesses.
What is an even more radical departure, the commanding officer who appoints the
court-martial is forbidden henceforth to admonish any member of the court with
respect to findings and sentences. This ends the old Army custom whereby
commanding officers picked the jurors and then instructed them on what action
to take, thus serving as both accuser and judge.

Further to remove the influence of the field command on judicial matters,
Congress has now made the Judge Advocate General's Department an independent
agency in the Army and given it the power of review. This separation of powers
was bitterly fought by military leaders from General Eisenhower on down, on the
grounds that field commanders would be deprived of the authority on which the
discipline and morale of the Army depend. Their arguments had the effect of
implying that officers in the legal branch of the Army might be less interested
in discipline and morale than the officers in combat units. Congress failed to
heed the implication and held to the civilian notion that legal evidence should
be weighed by disinterested, legal minds.

Except for the court-martial reforms, which, while of utmost importance, will
improve the lot of only those soldiers who get into serious trouble, the bulk
of the Army's recent moves to make military life more democratic must be
considered superficial. This is said, not to discourage such moves, which are
worthy, but in the realization, undoubtedly shared by the Army, that officers
must always be in some sense superior to enlisted men if there is to be any
discipline. And enlisted men who retain any sense of civilian values will
continue to resent that superiority until the Army has a full set of officers
that even a hardened top kick can look up to.

What must be appreciated is that the elimination of this or that cause of GI
griping is not going to change the basic aspects of military subjugation that
make men look around for some target for their spleen. As any veteran must
admit, the enlisted man in the U.S. Army is far better off than his counterpart
in any major army in the world. And the Army, being American, will probably
continue to enhance the position of its noncommissioned men. But that will not
stop the griping, because if men do not curse their food or their officers they
will curse some other outward manifestation of their fate under a regime that,
no matter how benevolently administered, is frankly dictatorial.

In reality it isn't the idea, for example, that officers have their exclusive
clubs which irritates enlisted men. As one crusty sergeant remarked before the
Doolittle Committee, "Who the hell wants to fraternize with officers, anyway?"
What galls non-commissioned Americans is the idea that officers consider
themselves in a class above the masses of men who are making at least as many
personal sacrifices as the "brass." There are, unfortunately, very few military
men who can assume the distinctions of being officers without neglecting
General Eisenhower's warning that "these distinctions must never imply nor
condone any assumption of human superiority, which is not only un-American and
unethical but is ineffective in developing the kind of unit that is necessary
to battle success."

The Army is continually up against the problem of getting every man to do the
things he does not want to do. It is not too difficult to get men to carry out
assignments that flatter their sense of usefulness and self-sacrifice. Few
soldiers balk at jobs; that make them look good to themselves. The problem is
how to get men to obey orders that appear to them to be senseless, unnecessary,
inconsiderate, tyrannical, inane, discriminatory, and not in keeping with their
high sense of purpose. And soft soap is not the answer.

The answer, of course, is discipline; discipline as harsh and as undemocratic
as is necessary to take care of all eventualities. That discipline, as shown
during World War II, is not overirksome to men who are serving under competent
officers in work that is obviously contributing directly to the winning of a
war or its aftermath. Where the discipline is most resented is among men,
particularly those drafted from civilian jobs, who feel that they are wasting
their time -- in base depots, permanent home stations, and repetitious
training courses.

The 1949 draftee will be part of a smaller and better organized draft than that
of 1940; his pay and quarters will be better; he will have modern weapons to
handle, rather than wooden rifles; he will serve among men who are mainly
volunteers, and therefore less likely to be discontented, and he will be
commanded by better qualified and more experienced officers. He will also have
occupation duty as a possible outlet for his desire to be doing something
useful, whereas the 1940 draftee had nothing tangible to train for except mock
war games.

Yet there is still room for doubting General Devers's flat statement, "He will
like it." Few persons with normal sensitivities like being thrown into a coarse
society that of necessity extols aggressiveness as the highest of personal
qualities and killing as the finest of arts. Fairly convincing proof of this is
the fact that four out of every ten men who were discharged from the Army for
medical reasons during World War II were suffering from some nervous or mental
disorder, and of these, about 60 per cent were men who never saw combat service
but cracked up after a period of trying to adjust to the drastically different
way of military life.

When you come right down to it, however, the point is not whether a draftee
will like or dislike his twenty-one months of compulsory service. The point is
that the legislative representatives of this country have decided that it is
the duty of all youths to devote this much time to military training. In view
of this, I personally believe that the adjustment to military life could be
made easier for youngsters (and vicariously for their parents) if the Army
would can its ballyhoo that conscription is "good for our boys" and stand,
instead, on the contention that military training, while tough, is good for the
country.

There's much to be said for facing facts, even if it means giving up the
vote-fetching pretext that the Army is not concerned as much with the
development of fighting forces as with the regeneration of the country's
democratic, intellectual, and spiritual forces. The latter, after all, could be
entrusted to civilian minds, if the Army wants to stick to fighting.